Digital BW, The Print

> From: Ken Carney [mailto:kcarney1@...]
>
> I found the answer to the other part of my question, about the benefits of
> RAID, on today's update on the Luminous Landscape site.  At my firm, our
> servers have RAID arrays.  I should know more about it, but I leave the
> technology to other partners who like it, so I can do what I do.
> Basically
> I knew they cost a gazillion dollars but would save our butt in
> case of a HD
> failure.  The Luminous Landscape site describes a one-terrabyte RAID-5
> array, with four HD's (three plus one in case of failure, the "hot disc" I
> believe it's called), for $1,600.  http://www.infrant.com/  After reading
> the explanation, I can see a lot of benefit in this for
> photographers.  I'm
> thinking a good upgrade solution would be the PC with two HD's, one for
> programs and one for a PS scratch disc, and the RAID box for storage of
> images (along with DVD backups as I'm doing now).

Well, there are two basic kinds of RAID, the kind that uses multiple disks
for redundancy, and the kind that combines them for speed (or some
combination of the two). I don't bother with the former, because I prefer
doing conventional backups across the network to a different machine in a
different part of the house. But I have two 120GB drives striped to look
like a single 240GB drive. That doubles the data rate to and from the drive,
which makes Photoshop's swapping faster. Then, I have a 250GB drive in
another machine that I copy stuff to roughly on a weekly basis.

None of this is that expensive. Disk drives are about half a buck per gig
(still under a buck for the largest sizes), and a two-disk RAID controller
card can be bought for $15 on the internet. It's becoming a routine feature
for motherboards, too.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...